Catholicism

By Kevin G. Long, Ph.D., Director of Public Affairs, Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights | August 11, 1986

It is tragic how many lapsed Catholcis like Anne Quindlen (see "My Catholicism: not a faith, but a shared history," Aug. 5) have abandoned the essentials of their religion while clinging to fond childhood memories of its external trappings. It is also unfortuante that those memories of Catholicism are as confused as they are fond. For the record, I would like to correct Quindlen's factual errors: (a) Kyrie eleison is Greek, not Latin; (b) the church has never in its history commanded Catholics to eat fish on...

TIANJIN, China, April 1, Reuters - "Come in and have a look. " The welcoming sign on the gates of a ramshackle building with metal walls off a highway near this industrial city in northern China masks a grim reality: this is an underground Catholic church barely tolerated by Communist Party authorities. Inside, a 30-year-old priest tells hundreds of Catholics, some sitting cross-legged on the floor because the pews are full, that he had just visited a parishioner, diagnosed with cancer years ago...

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people. Cardinal George has every right to an opinion on the issue as long as he stays in the religious arena. If the Church does not recognize "gay marriage" -- that's well within its rights. However, do not say, "the state has no power to create something that nature itself tells us is impossible.” The Church's opinion is just opinion, not fact. Moreover, "urging parishioners to contact state legislators and voice opposition to...

For many, faith does not allow room for doubt. For others, doubt can serve as a meaningful signpost on a spiritual journey. Two Chicago-based authors, Amy Andrews and Karen Beattie, will share their stories as part of "The Way of Doubt: Telling Stories, Building Faith" at Holy Cross Catholic Church, 724 Elder Lane, Deerfield. On Sunday at 6 p.m., each will read from her recently published memoirs. Andrews is the co-author with Jessica Mesman Griffith of "Love & Salt: A Spiritual...

Laura Durkin grew up in an Irish Catholic family. Her husband, Brian Friedler, who is Jewish, came from five generations of cantors. After they fell in love and married, they wanted to find a way to share both religious traditions with their son. Their search led them to The Family School of Chicago, a religious education program that teaches children of Jewish and Catholic parents about both faiths. "I had no idea we would be able to find a place...

All that practice reading the Bible paid off for 12-year-old Emily Kaderabek, who impressed parishioners at St. Michael Parish in Orland Park during a recent Easter vigil with her recitation of verses from the Book of Isaiah. It wasn't a grueling task for Emily, who has enjoyed being a child lector at the church since 2008, is active as an altar server and used to sing in the choir. "I like the warm community that accepts everyone, and it feels like family," Emily said. While...

From a rostrum near that ghostly metal legacy of Pablo Picasso, the Is-It-a-Woman-or-Is-It-a-Horse? sculpture in Daley Plaza, specters of past anti-Catholic prejudices were being exhumed. Like Chicago's morning sun, the rhetoric was hot well before noon Thursday. Speakers reminded an audience of about 100 people of the long-standing bias against American Catholics-from a 19th Century nativist movement and political force dubbed the Know-Nothing Party, which feared Catholicism as ...

One day last September, the Rev. Frank Latzko, pastor of St. Teresa of Avila Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, decided to take a walk and rediscover why he became a priest. His feet carried him from the Lincoln Park neighborhood to France, across the Pyrenees mountains, into Spain and eventually to Italy, where he stood in St. Peter's Square to witness the historic debut of Pope Francis - the first pope to take that name. But Latzko's journey still wasn't complete. Last week, he...

The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explored By George Weigel Cliff Street/HarperCollins, 196 pages, $24 British novelist Evelyn Waugh ("Brideshead Revisited") was one of the last century's great writers. Waugh was also a notoriously nasty man, a bigot and a snob who didn't hesitate to express his crudest prejudices or treat his "inferiors" as well as his children with casual disdain. He essentially drank himself to death at 63. A convert to Catholicism, he...

BUENOS AIRES/RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio reached deep into communities to put his Church on the front lines of their social, economic and spiritual struggles. In the vast slums that circle the Argentine capital, part of a massive urban sprawl of 13 million people, the man who this week became the first Latin American pope would occasionally celebrate Mass. More importantly, though, he deployed priests, nuns and...

The people and priests who sacrificed so generously in the 19th Century to build what is now the Catholic Church in Chicago made no small plans. They constructed and staffed churches and schools where none had previously existed to meet the educational and spiritual needs of largely immigrant flocks. This vast, energetic and authentically visionary undertaking succeeded beyond any prophesying of it. Out of its parishes, schools and universities rose a well-educated people who,...

As Cardinal Francis George prepares to leave this week for the Vatican to elect a new pope, several soon-to-be Roman Catholics in the Archdiocese of Chicago said the coinciding of their decision to convert with a historic moment for the church heightens their experience. Cory Fisher, of Palatine, was one of hundreds who attended a rite of election ceremony at Holy Name Cathedral on Sunday with George delivering the homily. The rite is part of the initiation...

Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. These are my bona fides: a word, a phrase, a sentence in a language no one speaks anymore. Kyrie eleison. Confiteor dei. I am a Catholic. Once at a nursing home for retired clergy, I ate lunch with a priest 90 years old, a man who still muttered the Latin throughout the English mass and ate fish on Fridays. When he learned how old I was, he said with some satisfaction, "You were a Catholic when being a Catholic still meant something." ...

A political conservative turned liberal, lifelong Roman Catholic and world-class curmudgeon, Garry Wills has called President Barack Obama a disappointment and Pope Benedict XVI irrelevant - and that was before the pontiff announced his resignation. In his latest book, “Why Priests? A Failed Tradition,” the former seminarian turned historian goes after priests. But hey, it's just history. Nothing personal. “I have nothing against priests,” Wills says at the start of the book,...

A political conservative turned liberal, lifelong Roman Catholic and world-class curmudgeon, Garry Wills has called President Barack Obama a disappointment and Pope Benedict XVI irrelevant - and that was before the pontiff announced his resignation. In his latest book, “Why Priests? A Failed Tradition,” the former seminarian turned historian goes after priests. But hey, it's just history. Nothing personal. “I have nothing against priests,” Wills says at the start of the book,...

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people. Cardinal George has every right to an opinion on the issue as long as he stays in the religious arena. If the Church does not recognize "gay marriage" -- that's well within its rights. However, do not say, "the state has no power to create something that nature itself tells us is impossible.” The Church's opinion is just opinion, not fact. Moreover, "urging parishioners to contact state legislators and voice opposition to...

A married man with three children has been ordained a priest by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge. Rev. Frank Bass, a former Episcopal priest, is the first married Catholic priest in Baton Rouge, but there are about 125 elsewhere in the nation. Catholicism normally bars married priests, but Pope John Paul II issued a provision in 1980 under which some Episcopal, Anglican and Lutheran clergy have been admitted.

As the queen mother of megachurches, Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington has become a refuge for spiritual seekers and people of faith who no longer feel inspired by the religious institutions that raised them. After the sex abuse scandal that rocked the Roman Catholic Church, droves of Catholics found their way to the undecorated sanctuary and fresh air of Willow Creek. Author Chris Haw probably passed them going the opposite direction. In his spiritual memoir "From Willow Creek to...

Kudos for your 12-part series. I bet most Catholics who read it learned more in two weeks about the administrative structure, complex problems and global presence of their religion than what they otherwise would have learned in a lifetime. You should have, however, added a 13th installment on Catholicism in Asia, featuring, among other things, the religious persecutions in China, North Korea, North Vietnam and East Timor.

WARSAW (Reuters) - At the sound of a bell from the altar, relayed over loud-speakers, about 50,000 people at an open-air mass last month in the Polish capital dropped down to kneel in the street. It was a powerful symbol of Poland's deeply felt Roman Catholicism, a reminder of the scenes in the 1980s when, inspired by Polish Pope John Paul II, people prayed in the streets and brought down Communist rule. But modernity intruded on this recent moment of spiritual...